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Epiphany and Authenticity: the Aesthetic Vision of Charles Taylor

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Epiphany and Authenticity: the Aesthetic Vision of Charles Taylor Epiphany and Authenticity: The Aesthetic Vision of Charles Taylor Brian J. Braman The language of self-fulfillment, self-actualization, and self-realization have become common currency in contemporary culture. In fact, these ideas can be subsumed under the inclusive term of authenticity. Cultural critics such as the late Allan Bloom and Christopher Lasch see this desire for individual self-fulfillment, for being authentic, as a form of narcissism that closes ott concern for the greater issues that transcend the self, be they political or religious. For Charles Taylor, however, although a certain moral relativism can be associated with the desire for self-fulfillment, this posi­ tion is in the last analysis a profound mistake. What the critics of authentic­ ity fail to see is the moral ideal underlining this desire for authentic self-re­ alization. This ideal is the intense desire to live one ·s life by a higher standard. In short, the question of the constitution of authentic human exis­ tence is a question of a moral ideal that ought to be taken seriously because the meaning of authenticity has shaped, and continues to shape, our under­ standing of what it means to be human. For Taylor the idea of authenticity is a rich, vibrant, and vitally impor­ tant addition to any conversation concerning what it means to be human. Authenticity, properly understood. is "a picture of what a better or higher mode of life would be, where better and higher are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard of what we ought to desire.'' 1 Taylor's view of authenticity expresses the conviction that terms such as self-fulfillment and self-realization are not just cover stories for narcissism, nor are they terms that justify a stance that is labeled the "liber- I Charles Taylor. The Ethics ~~{'Authenticity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 16. 224 EPIPHANY AND AUTHENTICITY 225 alism of neutrality." Authenticity is a moral ideal that ultimately answers the question: What is the good life? Yet, with the rise of modernity and the dissolution of the medieval syn­ thesis, there is no longer a publicly established order of references to artic­ ulate a normative vision of authentic human existence. Given the lack of publicly agreed upon references, the question then becomes the following: How are we to determine or discover that which is most important in shap­ ing our identity, in articulating what our ideal of authenticity is to be? Is there a source other than the self? To answer these questions, Taylor turns to aesthetics, more specifically to the notion of epiphany. An epiphany is a manifestation which brings us into the presence of something which is oth­ erwise inaccessible, and which is of the highest moral or spiritual signifi­ cance. It is in modem art and poetry that Taylor finds the clearest expres­ sion of epiphanic events. Modern art and poetry respect modernity's concern for the subject, without falling into a disordered subjectivism. Modern art is at once inward, yet it involves the de-centering of the subject. Because we now live in an age where a "publicly accessible cosmic order of meaning" is no longer possible, the idea of epiphanic art bridges the gap that has been left by this disintegration of public order. In short, the idea of epiphanic art anchors Taylor's concern with the search "for moral sources outside the subject through languages which resonate within him or her, the grasping of an order which is inseparably indexed to a personal vision."2 The purpose of this paper, then, will be to first draw out Taylor's under­ standing of authenticity by focusing on the themes of identity and episte­ mology. Secondly, I will show how epiphanic art anchors Taylor's concern with the search for normative moral sources outside the subject. For Taylor, to have an identity is not something that is optional. Deep within ourselves is a desire to have a sense of orientation within the world. We need to have a sense of who and what we are, and where our lives are leading us. From Taylor's perspective, our identity is ultimately determined by what we consider to be of utmost value, by a hypergood3 that not only structures our choices but shapes the fundamental orientation of our lives. When we speak about who we are and what it means for us to be human, the touchstone is whatever hypergood we have chosen by which to struc­ ture our lives. Taylor defines authenticity as an ideal we choose and "Charles Taylor, Sources (if the Se!f (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1989). p. 510. J For Taylor, a hypergood is an architectonic good that structures all of our moral choices. It is the ideal that helps to shape our self-constituting choices. 226 BRIAN J. BRAMAN whereby we do what we ought to do, and not what we merely wish to do. Authenticity and identity go hand in hand, since we always see ourselves in terms of whatever ideal we have chosen in order to give structure to our­ selves as persons. Of course, Taylor recognizes that there exists, more often than not, a gap between the full realization of this vision, and what we claim as our chosen ideal of authenticity. There is one thing, however, that Taylor wants to be very clear about: while we choose this authentic ideal that shapes our identity, this choice is not made within a vacuum, nor can it be. Taylor reformulates Heidegger's notion of thrownness in terms of en­ gaged agency to show that our being-in-the-world is a matrix of already constituted meanings and values. Why is Taylor so insistent on showing that one's identity is always al­ ready contextualized? It is in large part because of modernity's changed un­ derstanding of the nature of reason. In working out his understanding of au­ thenticity, Taylor has concomitantly rehabilitated an understanding of human reason that goes beyond what he sees as a current debasement. The modern understanding of reason for Taylor militates against any hope of moving beyond either procedural approaches or cost-benefit analysis in order to determine what authentic human existence is. Modernity's diminished understanding of the nature and power of reason obviously begins with Descartes's understanding of reason in terms of clar­ ity. We now are concerned with what the thinking subject generates. We are concerned that our thoughts be ordered properly so that certainty of knowl­ edge may follow. "Now certainty is something that the mind has to generate for itself. It requires a reflexive turn, where instead of simply trusting the opinions one has acquired through one's upbringing, one examines their foundation, which is ultimately to be found in one's own mind."4 Accord­ ing to Taylor, this shift in how reason is conceived occurs simultaneously with the rise of modern science. With the ascendancy of science, the whole of the cosmos is now understood as neutral. This neutrality suggests that nature waits to have its purposes imposed on it.S When science neutralizes the world, and the ordered sense of being disappears, the paradigm we use to guide our life is no longer given to us in nature or society. The paradigms are found within our reasoning powers. In short, "reason is no longer de- 4 Charles Taylor, "Overcoming Epistemology," in After Philosophy: End or Tran.~formation, eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994). p. 468. 5 Charles Taylor, "Justice After Virtue," in After Macintyre, eds. John Horton and Susan Mendus (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1994), p. 20. EPIPHANY AND AUTHENTICITY 227 fined substantively, in terms of a vision of cosmic order, but formally in terms of procedures that thought ought to follow and especially those in­ volved in fitting means to ends, instrumental reason. The hegemony of rea­ son is consequently redefined, and now means not ordering our lives ac­ cording to the vision of order, but rather controlling desires by the canons of instrumental reason."'6 Because reason is no longer understood as sub­ stantive, that is, ordered to something other than itself, human reason be­ comes understood as an activity of making or teclzne. This new notion of reason gives rise to a view of the subject as autonomous. His or her free­ dom is rooted in a self-direction made by the person. To repeat, because reason has been disengaged from any order outside of itself, and the cos­ mos has no intrinsic meaning and simply stands at the disposition of the purposes imposed upon it by the person, human reason and existence are entirely self-directed according to orders constructed by the subject, "as against those which he is supposed to find in nature. "7 This new notion of reason eventually gives rise to skepticism which leads to naturalism, utilitarianism, and formalism. For Taylor, naturalism seeks to define the human person according to the scientific canons that emerged in the seventeenth century. Behaviorism and computer theories of human knowing are such examples. But when it comes to the question of the ethical life, or what it means to be authentic, naturalism holds that goods or values are mere personal projections onto a world which in essence is neutral. Projection, then, is strictly an individual activity that can be eventually brought under voluntary controJ.8 Naturalism becomes so at­ tractive to the moderns, because it appears to be capable "of achieving a kind of disengagement from our world by objectifying it.
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